


Assurance

by stagprince



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 04:11:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4045447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stagprince/pseuds/stagprince
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fenris slowly getting used to Hawke's presence. A little hurt/comfort set between the 3 year gap where they bang but then don't talk about it because whats up with that you guys. Seriously. Anyway, maybe going to be a few one shots to bridge that gap. Sorry for the worlds Dumbest Title who the hell knows how to title this kinda bs</p>
            </blockquote>





	Assurance

**Author's Note:**

> hopefully i wont get bored n maybe write like, another chapter who knows  
> warning @ the beginning for fenris having Shitty Dreams n panicking and mentions of Danarius ?? be careful folks dont want you guys to get into this w/o a lil warning (nothing 2 graphic though!)

They brush hands at the table while passing cards, and for a moment, Fenris forgets to flinch back. It is a rare occurrence indeed that a single touch doesn’t send him scurrying backwards sword drawn swift from his spine like he is ready to shear through whatever force stands before him. Hawke is already shuffling through his hand and laughing at something Varric has said, and for a whole minute, Fenris wonders whether the whole event is imagined.

He loses the round, as well as a hand of 20 silvers. He refuses to be so careless again, and ruthlessly decimates the whole table for the next round. (Isabela winks at him twice and he is quite certain she is throwing her hand on purpose. He slips a few more aces from the deck between his cards, and lays them down just to see Hawke pull the beat-down-dog face he somehow wears so well. The mage slumps across the table and must consoled for the next 5 minutes. Fenris never imagined a grown man sobbing could somehow be endearing.)

\---

Hawke is a terrible drunk. He can barely keep up and that is, unfortunately, half the problem. The idea of drinking buddies was admittedly appealing at first, but the lustre is quickly dissipating as Fenris realizes that both Varric and Isabela have somehow quietly withdrawn, and he is left with the mess.

The mess is currently sprawled across a table and looking up at him with unfocused but endearing gaze.

“A-and another thing..” Hawke manages to somehow mumble past his lips which by all accounts feel sort of bruised like they’ve been punched, and like he’s trying to run his words with a mouth full of honey all at once. His tongue, usually gilded silver, is leaden and heavy in his mouth, however he gathers the consternation to shakingly raise a finger. He points to Fenris, though his aim is a little off. He alights his fingertip most gently on the elf’s nose. He is fixed with the most perplexed expression he has ever seen on Fenris, and can’t help but burst out in a fit of laughter, rolling himself near off the table - it is a sturdy pair of hands that catches him, and hefts him a little roughly to his feet.

“I think you’ve had enough, Hawke,” Comes the rumble of Fenris’s voice, and Hawke thinks it is possibly the most sensible thing he has heard him say yet. His arm somehow winds its way around Fenris’s shoulders, and he leans against him sagging all boneless like a sack of particularly inebriated potatoes. 

“The other thing is, woah, have you been lifting those half broken statues in that mansion, or something?” Hawke grins at him all lopsided and like he thinks he’s particularly clever. This is not an unusual event. Fenris doesn’t even falter, though he is at least a head shorter, and somehow they stumble between barstools and drunken patrons and make it from the muggy air of The Hanged Man’s bar room to the cool bite of the evening air. Between the stumbling of Hawke’s feet and the rowdy customers it is a miracle they make it at all, but the respite is welcome, even if Lowtown smells a little of puke and piss. From the docks wafts the smell of the ocean, and the less kind reek of fish, and Fenris is grateful a million times over that the great staircase that splits the two halves of the city is close by. Hawke is still babbling into his ear, but his continuous prattle is nothing new, and if anything, soothes the edges of his fraying nerves. He’s not scared of the dark, but the shadows hide people better at night. 

Hawke would be useless if it came to a fight, in this state, so he hurries - the trip is awkward and ungainly but they end up in hightown relatively unscathed (Fenris stubbed his toe once, and cursed a few times in Tevinter, which Hawke commented on as ‘thoroughly charming’. Hawke also had to rest his forehead against the stones for a few minutes lest he throw up on Fenris’s bare feet. Again. Fenris could think of a fair few things to call it, and it was as far from charming as could be.) and Fenris realizes in a moment of brilliance, that Danarius’s mansion (His house. His house is what he was supposed to call it but the word never came easily to him, and it never felt like home. It had, and always would be Danarius’s mansion. Whether he would ever come back for it or not was another question entirely.) is closer than the Hawke Estate, and up fewer stairs too. He lugs his half stumbling half snoring companion the remainder of the journey, and casts an eye about the crumbling entrance hall for a place to put him. The mansion was riddled with extra rooms and they mount the double staircase together, a mixed up jumbled of limbs like they are running a three legged race tied together all wrong. After scraping up the tired tiled steps, they stagger into the small side room, light spilling from the landing to illuminate the stuffy little space equipped with dusty bed and (thankfully) an old wooden bucket. Hawke would probably need it before the night was through, the light weight that he was. 

Hawke was half asleep before Fenris even dropped him into bed - he’d tried lowering him, but his arms were tired and his grip tenuous at best. There was a puff of dust as the mage hits the mattress, and Hawke scrumples his face, gives a snort, and rolls over. Fenris gives him a curt nod, and pauses for a moment - as if tentative to fret over him anymore. After a second, he decides to forgo tucking the blanket around him - he’s certain Hawke would kick it off regardless.

Fenris instead pads across the smattering of tiles - some loosened from the fight for the mansion long ago, others dislodged more recently in one of his more spiteful moods. Gingerly he edges open the door of his room, and casts about for a moment - he thought he’d had one left? A mirthless sort of smile pulls at the edges of his mouth as he finds a dusty bottle with cork still in it, and it fits against his palm with the familiarity of an old friend. He ambles towards his bed, wine bottle in hand, and edges out the cork with a practised sort of grace. 

\----

In the middle of the night it grips him the worst. The terror runs through him like lightning, like fire down his spine the way rum runs down his throat, but worse than that and with twice the burning. He leaps to his feet in a frenzy and he hears them at the door, at the window, feet thumping like thunder hands breaking the glass windows like its nothing, like the shards are bits of paper torn asunder by the hands of giants. He tries not to make any noise but his feet scuff on the cold of the floor tiles (too loud, too loud, shit), his hands still drunk with sleep cast uselessly about to grab at bottles that clink together, in the dead of night sounding loud as church bells. Theres no way out and he knows it, his years of running for naught. His breath rips from his mouth like his lungs are the bellows from the smithy down the road, and his tongue tastes of tar, of blood, of soot and dirt from being beat face in the dust again and again and again. He imagines Danarius’s face leering over him, breath hot and sickly sweet from wine and sweet meats and anything else he desires. Danarius desires so much and Fenris shivers and feels his skin crawl as he remembers clammy sweaty palms across his skin. He shakes and his skin crawls like a thousand ants live inside it and he wishes nothing more than to shuck it off - but he can’t, he can’t. He might not be chained but the burns of his slavery and welded against his skin, tattoos that will never disappear, that will always remind him. No matter how from Tevinter he is, he is still owned, still branded, and they are coming. They are always coming.

All of this happens in an instant flicking like pictures behind his eyes, before he remembers he is in the quiet of his decrypt house, and that the only light isn’t torch light but the moon shining through the broken windows above. His teeth are chattering but whether its from cold or fear he cares little to find out. The bottle in his hand sloshes, the forgotten contents of another night lurching awake and sweating, so he draws it to his lips and drinks. The taste is bitter not sweet, and strikes him in the back of throat - the rim of the bottle coated with dust. He coughs, but chokes it back regardless, before tossing the bottle aside with a growl. It smashes before the dwindling coals of the fireplace, and sputters the last of the fire out with a sizzling hiss. 

“Fenris?” His name sends him jumping, skittering across the tiles his back placed against the wall, already grasping about for anything, something to defend himself with - but his hands find nothing, nothing but empty space and the cracking plaster of the once elaborate mantel.

To his credit, Hawke doesn’t even slur his name, drink addled as he still probably is. The fact that Fenris recognizes the voice doesn’t help with the suddenness of it, but Hawke shuffles closer, a little hunched and an old blanket wrapped about his shoulders. He squints in the dark like an old man without his spectacles, wane and pale and a little ill about the edges. But here is there, all the same, and gratifyingly from the present: a reminder that spectres of the past are gone. At least for now.

Hawke stops a few paces away and doesn’t come any closer. Fenris manages to uncurl from his half hunch, and almost guiltily steps away from the wall - though no closer. He coughs a little, if only to break the silences, and scratches idly at his cheek anything other than meet Hawke’s gaze.

“Sorry if I woke you,” He says though his mouth is tight, eyes hollow and haunted and far away. 

“Not to worry - though usually when I hear bottles breaking in the middle of the night, its Isabela trying to steal through my window with a few too many bottles of rum between her arms. Or out the windows, too,” He chuckles a little, though the sound is weak and dies fast. Fenris tries to stretch his mouth into a smile, but the gesture is lost with only the fickle fire light to illuminate it, and the darkness to cloak him. Hawke seems at a loss for what to say, and the awkwardness spans between them seeming a mile wide. 

With a sudden stroke of brilliance, Hawke shuffles forward, slowly peeling the old musty blanket from about his shoulders. Fenris watches him, eyes narrowed just slightly, like hes not sure what to make of him. The elf seems frayed around the edges, a little more hysterical savagery then bedraggled brooding, and it cautions Hawke’s tongue. He makes no snide quip or cunning remark, as he edges till they are standing but a few centimetres apart. Fenris’s eyes haven’t left his face, not for a moment. They are sharp and wide, pupils dilated huge and black with the faintest rim of emerald green about the edges - the dark parts of the jewel of course, all the refracted light barely illuminating that near black green. Hawke has to cautiously tip toe past splints of broken glass, though he doesn’t mention it. Instead, he loops the blanket about Fenris’s shoulders - the sudden movement causing the elf to flinch back for a second and freeze as the blanket curls about him.

And with that, Hawke gives a little nod, a quick smile, and totters back to the couch, flopping down bodily as though his limbs were weights made of stone, head lolling back against the hard edge of the couch. There is a ‘thunk’ as his skull connects with the wood and he makes a little groan as he goes down, but scarce other noise. He settles a moment later seeming comfortable as one can be, sprawled across the space of what would have once been a purposely uncomfortable lounge for quick business meetings with Tevinter nobility. The juxtaposition to the bear of a man that now occupied it was a twist of irony Fenris would mull over later.

Instead, Fenris holds to his wall. His corner of sanctuary for a moment longer, till he takes a cautious step forward - he was always cautious. Perhaps a little too wary, but it had kept him alive and two steps ahead, and that was a fact. He scrunches his nose as he clenches the blanket tighter around his shoulders. Hawke hasn’t moved for what seems an age. There is a soft sort of huff of his breathing, steady and rhythmic. Fenris edges closer.

 

And closer.

Till he’s standing above Hawke, warily peering down.

Hawke chooses then to open his mouth wide and drool a little, a silver slip of spit rolling down the side of his cheek.

Fenris scrunches his nose a little more.

He perches on the couch, tentatively, then a little slacker. He balls himself up tight under the blanket, stealing glances at the prone form next to him. He still feels the shiver up his spine, but the warmth of Hawke’s side sets his shoulders sagging a little. Slowly, he yawns, feeling sleep tugging him wearily down.

It takes a few minutes before he places his chin on the tops of his knees, clutched tight to his chest, and finally, lets his eyes close.

Half an hour later he is tucked against Hawke’s side, head resting on his chest, fast asleep.


End file.
